This is from Phreak’s Patch 13.23 Rundown (my transcription isn’t perfect but it should be understandable). I think a lot of what’s lost in translation from what Phreak says in his videos and what the community responds to is because most of the community will not sit to watch a 1:56:03 video (most people have lives, but I do not) unless they already like what Phreak is doing. Hopefully this transcription helps bridge the gap.

Social Media Interaction

I want to give a thank you to two sections of people, very specifically

1. Everyone who has been kind and encouraging and giving me encouragement.

It has been a strange couple of weeks of a lot of toxicity, so I really appreciate people who have been consistently positive/helpful, or those who have come out and seen this stuff and been like “well I’ll come out and try to be positive/helpful”. I really appreciate that. Thank you for everyone that has been kind and trying to be uplifting, I appreciate that, thank you very much.

2. The second thing I want to give thanks to is those of you who have been watching these videos and helping to spread this information out, correcting misinformation. I’ve seen a lot of people will just say things that are just fact-check-ably untrue and it gets upvoted on the subreddit and it’s just mind-boggling, and there some who maybe they charitably misinterpreted or maybe they’re just being malignant. I appreciate everyone who steps in to correct the record and says “No, here’s what he actually said:” or “Here’s what was said like a month ago”. I really appreciate those of you who have come out and helped to spread knowledge and fix some information. I really appreciate that

The second section I will say here is that I am more or less going to quit social media for the immediate future. The amount of toxicity has risen so sharply that it is not worth me seeing the occasional useful comment amidst all the death threats. So, it is what it is.

Giving Better Feedback Part 1

I want to talk about giving feedback. So, this isn’t about anything in particular to be clear. This is one thing I’ve noticed over the years, both before joining the design team and now afterwards. Players kind of suck at giving feedback, and I would like to give a very short “coaching session” on giving useful feedback.

I will start with an extra preamble. People are very good at identifying problems, they are very bad at identifying solutions. Identifying solutions to complex problems is a very difficult skill, it is an art not a science. It takes a lot of practice, it takes a lot of work; I’m not saying I’m perfect here by any means, but I will say better than average when I look at the types of comments posted on Reddit/Twitter. Anyone who says, “I can fix the game in three days” you’re wrong. I immediately know you’re not smart if you think that. I can’t (fix the game in three days) either, but at least I know that. I’m one step further on the Dunning-Kruger curve than the person who thinks they can fix the game is.

Regardless, I want to talk about giving feedback in an effective way. The most frequent version of feedback I see is “My champ sucks.” This is pretty objectively disprovable. Basically every champion in League of Legends is either:

1. A meaningful pro-play pick which means to the best players in the world that this champion is good, and maybe they’re wrong, pro players have been wrong before, but the best players in the world at least think this is good, so they’re more likely to be right than you are.
2. High win rate in some matchmaking band. Shyvanna is not a strong jungler in Challenger. She’s not a strong Jungler in Masters, she’s not really a strong Jungler in Diamond, but she’s very very good in Iron-Gold and she’s still quite good in Platinum-Emerald. So when there’s the chain of comments that’s like “XD no shyvanna buffs”, Yeah she’s one of the strongest champions in the game for 80% of players. This champion isn’t bad, she’s bad in your games. This is not correctable by mastery, she has a relatively shallow mastery curve. This is the type of champion she is, it just doesn’t perform well in higher elo games. That’s too bad, but this doesn’t mean this champion sucks. It means this champion sucks in your games (this doesn’t mean she sucks because of YOU specifically). No, just the environment of High Diamond/Master/GM/Challenger games isn’t conducive to Shyvanna. That is true. That’s factually accurate. This doesn’t mean your Champion sucks. That’s just not how that works.

Giving Better Feedback Part 2 (Riven)

Secondary topic! We’ll jump on the hot-button issue of Riven recently where the comments I see about Riven are that “Riven sucks!”. Well again, Riven doesn’t suck. It’s the opposite of the Shyvanna effect. The Shyvanna players say Shyvanna sucks; the Riven players say Riven sucks. Combined, they each cover the entire swath of the game at 52% winrate. You have the Masters+ crowd where Riven is one of the best performing top-laners in the entire game and you have the sub-Emerald crowd where Shyvanna is one of the best performing junglers in the game. At exactly Diamond, they’re both kind of mediocre. …

The point here isn’t about winrate itself, this is just to say: This champion wins more games than it loses in at least one section of the playerbase, and not like a small section (In the entire cohort of Masters+, Riven wins more than half of her games, that’s a fairly large number of players. It’s also one MMR band that a lot of players purely focus on because they only look at relatively high elo matchmaking stuff. If you go even higher elo, Riven becomes one of the six best top laners in the game.)

Let’s move on the point I’m trying to give here … Saying, “My champion sucks!” isn’t useful. There’s nothing good there other than: “Ah! Somebody on the internet said they didn’t enjoy playing their champion anymore.” And that’s very useless. That’s incredibly useless. I do not care that some random person on Reddit isn’t having fun playing their favorite champion anymore, and they’re blaming it on the champion being weak (which is probably not the case), just in general.

…

I will dive in to some core problems with Riven that could be solvable. Riven is a very, very snowbally, very high agency champion (in the early game). What I mean is that in the first ten levels, you’re locked into a 1v1 lane (Yes the jungler can show up once in a while, but in high elo Junglers spend their time bot lane not top lane, and Riven’s never been good in low elo. She requires a lot of mastery, it’s just kind of the case. I’m just gonna tunnel on Diamond+ since she’s always been a high mastery champion.)

…

When I hear “Riven sucks” what I actually think is that Riven is a sharply scaling, high agency, no fallback pattern melee champion, with very sharp match-ups, and to reiterate: no fallback pattern.

When Riven is a winning lane, and let’s say she gets first blood, she has: Four Dashes, Two Stuns, and her Basic Attack, her Passive, her Q, her W, her E, her R, and R2 all scale with Long Swords. So, if you buy a Long Sword, you scale seven different parts of your kit. If you want to count each Q, it’s nine (that’s kind of fraudulent). There are seven separate mechanics, maybe it’s six because you don’t want to count both halves of R although to be fair R1 and R2 are very different buttons. Every single one of then scales with Long Swords. This champ has four dashes and two stuns, and seven different parts of her kit that scale with Long Swords which means that if she gets ahead, she gets really ahead and you don’t have breathing room. You’re locked in lane with her, she can chase you down, she’ll stun-lock you; every single one of her buttons gets more powerful. She has a zero mana cost shield, you can’t poke her. You can’t run away because she has more dashes than you. You probably can’t CC chain her, slows don’t affect her (she has dashes).

This isn’t to actually say, “RIVEN IS ACTUALLY OP XD LMAO”, this is to say that when Riven gets ahead, she gets really ahead. This is just a truth about this champion. Which means, when Riven is over-tuned, as she was when she first came out, and people were like, “Omg she has a shield with an AD ratio? What kind of bullshit is this, how am I supposed to win?” that’s not really incorrect. You’re phrasing it a little bit wrong, but it’s like: Yes, this champion scales really really sharply with gold, has really good target access, and really good kill pressure. She’s a very high agency champion with very high gold scaling, which makes her very very volatile.

On the other side, Riven’s bad match-ups have no recourse. All of her buttons are melee. Sure, she might be able to withstand some of the bad ranged match-ups by saying: Okay, I’m getting Teemo/Kennen/Gnar poked. I can use dashes to stay out of range, I can go in and clear the wave, I can use my E shield to block some of the damage. She can go Doran’s Shield, she can go Second Wind, she has okay base HP regen … This means that she can withstand those lane (kind of). You put her into a melee champion, Renekton I think is a commonly chosen option here. To be clear, I don’t know her matchup tables here, I don’t know she’s supposed to against Jax/Singed/Gwen/etc. I do know that against any of the melee champions, if she’s behind, she cannot last-hit without being in threat-range of those champions. Let’s say it is supposed to be a winning matchup, she got ganked, there was a misplay/outplay/whatever, now she’s behind in gold, win-rate match-ups don’t matter because you’re in melee range. If you press Q1, Jax is punching you. If you press Q2, Singed has already flung you. If you press Q3 it doesn’t matter, they still out trade you (the K’Sante or whatever, who knows).

Riven doesn’t have a fall-back pattern. Compare it to someone like Rumble. Rumble has a fall-back pattern. He can use his Flame-Spitter from far away, he can use his Harpoons, he can do this from behind. Mundo can throw Cleavers, Gragas can throw Barrels, you can do something (Gnar, Teemo, etc.) As long as you’re not so far behind you’re instantly dying under tower … most champions have recourse. Riven doesn’t. She has to walk into range of Darius to last hit and Darius full-combos her for 800 damage. She might live, but that’s a recall and she got 2 CS for it. Or she can only get XP and maybe last-hit under turret. Ah sorry, the enemy top laner froze on you. You can die to break the freeze! That’s the your recourse. You can stand in XP range or you can die to break the freeze. Maybe you can’t even stand in XP range, who knows? That’s Riven, right?

That to me is a more useful synopsis (in maybe not in so many words)

…

Right now, Riven appears to be a late-game skewed champion. Which means on average, her early games are weak. Now they are high-agency, high volatility, but on average they are losing. Which means is what most Riven players experience in the current version of League of Legends … is that she has nothing to do in losing matchups, taking the L in lane for 14 minutes straight, and the finally playing out the back half of the game from a gold deficit, but from hopefully an okay position. That does not sound like a fun way to play League of Legends. This sounds like you’re opting-in to play Kayle without the guaranteed level sixteen promise.

…

Here’s the weird dichotomy here. Riven appears to be a scaling pick in the sense that she doesn’t tend to force 15-20 minute surrenders. Games that end quickly tend to be games that Riven has lost … I haven’t looked at her gold difference data. I can find it, but I haven’t looked at that. I am extrapolating a bit from observable data here, this is just a tangent I want to talk about even though I don’t have the full picture. I am believing this to be true, this is what I observe, but of course I am not a Masters Riven player. What I observe is that Riven tends to be on the losing end of early games more often than not. Which means you’re playing this champion that has very volatile high-agency lanes, but you’re on the losing end of that agency every time, or almost every time. Most match-ups are bad for you early game …

If you’re playing someone like Kayle, you’re like; “I know I have no agency in the early game and I know I’m not going to win the early game. I am going to take a backseat, I’m going to do nothing, and I am going to expect this out of myself. We get into the mid game, I become ranged, I get rank 2 of the passive. I got to 16, I’m now the best top laner in the game. I opted-in to this payout. This is part of the promise of why I play Kayle … This is expressly part of the kit, is that there is a level 16 power-spike that is very obvious.” Not every player wants to play like that, but as an opt-in experience that is very clearly promised by the entire kit (the players) can see it. There is a playerbase that is like “That’s how I want to play the game”. We can embrace that and it’s totally reasonable, and you get to the late game and your agency goes up because Kayle is a very good late game teamfighter. Her R is amazing, her auto attacks are amazing, she is good late game.

Riven does actually scale. She has very good gold ratios, which means if she can get over the hump and get to 2-3 items, she will convert gold to power better than other top laners. When we get into mid/late game and we have 12-13k gold, Riven uses that 13k gold better than other champions use that 13k gold. It’s not Kayle/Tryndamere tier with purely multiplicative scaling, but it’s still very high. She’s still one of the stronger top-laners with gold. This ties into snowballing of course

…

The thing about that though is Riven is a fairly squishy melee fighter. She is strong, but she is low agency late game. Kayle has very long attack range, an Invulnerability Ultimate with a ton of burst damage onto it, and has a lot of tools to space and play as a functional late-game marksman with enough free damage on her kit to keep up with marksmen’s multiplicative scaling. With just Nashor’s Tooth and a Deathcap, she’s doing the same stuff a Kai’sa can do in a lot of cases. Riven has to be melee and doesn’t have Tryndamere ultimate, which makes it hard to play your champion when Malz just laughs and presses R on you and goes, “nice agency bro, lmao. You scale with gold, have a suppression hope you build a QSS”.

This is why I believe playing Riven feels bad right now. I’m sure I’m wrong in some parts here. I believe I’m wrong in some parts here. In fact, this is the kind of thing where I would rely on actual Riven players to tell me the parts of the game that feel weird. My theory (And please feel free to write your actual feelings here!) is that all of her agency is in the early game, but she’s bad there. She’s bad in the early game where her agency is the highest.

To be fair if she had the highest agency in game, she would get perma-banned because everybody would hate laning against her. So we have to be pretty delicate there long term if we got there. But if we got there and said: "You have a lot of agency in the early game, but you’re the average top laner. You’re going to have some good match-ups and some bad match-ups, they’re going to be equal. You’re going to have the Darius/Renektons, but you’re also going to have some lanes you’ll be happy about. You’re going to beat Rumble and Jax, you probably won’t beat K’Sante because he buys armor and wins, but you’re going to have enough good matchups … that you feel good half of the time instead of 20% of the time. That shape probably feels better for Riven for the exact same win-rate.

That’s the kind of information that I wish players would give instead of “My Champ sucks!”. I think I’m right about most of this. I would love the corrections here. I would love the discussion here. What I’m asking about is for you to say things like: “I’m not having fun playing Riven because it feels like I’m losing all my early games and I can’t do anything about that. I can’t win my early games because all my match-ups suck in lane. My laning phase is too weak, I feel bad about playing the early game.” That is great directional “Here is the problem that I see” feedback. I’m not asking for solutions. I’m asking for a concise or specific problem statement. This is the feedback that is incredibly useful and I would like players to give more often.

TL;DR

Phreak is taking a break from social media for the immediate future.

Useful feedback is saying what feels good/bad when you play a champion. The example Phreak gives is: “I’m not having fun playing Riven because it feels like I’m losing all my early games and I can’t do anything about that. I can’t win my early games because all my match-ups suck in lane. My laning phase is too weak, I feel bad about playing the early game.” Saying “My champion sucks!” isn’t useful feedback.

Phreak thinks that Riven feels bad at the moment because although Riven scales really well with gold, she has the most agency in her early game where she is the weakest but loses agency as the game progresses due to being a squishy melee fighter, despite the strong gold scaling she has. He believes he can find a shape for Riven that is roughly the same winrate but feels better for her players. He would like feedback from Riven players on whether he came to the right conclusion and what feels good/bad about Riven currently.